Böcker av Carol Jackson Robinson

This book is the second in Carol Robinson’s Collected Works series.  Her penetrating and original analysis of the modern world show the fruit of a mind absorbed in the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas – her life-long companion. We hope that these essays will help Catholics understand how the Faith has importance for the totality of their lives which must not be hidden away from the public square.Excerpt from the Foreword"Christianity, when it is orthodox, is a religion of the heart, but not one of sentimentality.  Catholicism in all its tradition has been a religion illuminating the mind so that the spirit might find dwelling with God.Confusion and discomfort: this is the prospect of embracing the Gospel in the modern world.  Add to these the incomprehension or enmity from others, and you have a potent source of discouragement to living an integral and integrated Catholic life today.Must it be so?The Good One of course remains ever the same in charity and omnipotence, so the root and source of all holiness is still sound.  The unknown factor then must lie in the hearts of men if Christianity is to be put into action.  There will always be some – “the world” – who will consistently resist the grace and action of the Almighty.  Holding this book, it must be otherwise with us.  Faith has been given, grace has taken root, and so must the flourishing of fidelity and holiness.  Is this the happiness we seek?....The Beatitudes act as a defibrillator to these lethal conditions, should we choose to listen.  They re-animate the soul by enkindling charity and warmth within a heart that has grown cold.  And everyone knows that without a healthy heart one eventually dies for good."  - Fr. James DoranExcerpt from the Introduction"Carol Jackson Robinson’s Eightfold Kingdom Within is a noteworthy attempt to communicate Thomas’ developed thought of the Beatitudes to a non-academic audience, and while she does eschew any discussion of the intricacies of doctrinal development, subjects of undoubted interest to the historical theologians, nonetheless her series of remarkable articles reveal that Robinson was a careful and highly insightful reader of Aquinas. Over the course of her essays, Robinson rightly focuses on the task of placing the Beatitudes and their attendant Gifts once again at the center of Christian spiritual life. Perhaps Robinson’s insightfulness is most evident in the way she grasps that for Thomas, and indeed for much of the Christian tradition both East and West, the purpose and aim of the spiritual life is deification, what she refers to as the ongoing process of “being supernaturalized.” Moreover, Robinson stresses that this process of conversion, of becoming progressively more deiform, perforce requires our adoption as earthly children of the heavenly Father. If truth be told, that the process cannot proceed at all unless, like obedient children, we meekly receive the divine instigation of the Spirit, for only in this manner will we be established “firmly in the family of God our Father.” - Gregorio Montejo, PhD (Assistant Professor of Historical Theology, Boston College)

Excerpt from the Introduction: The articles in this little book, Breaking the Chains of Mediocrity, will discomfort the complacent Catholic. Though written seventy years ago, their urgent call has not lost any relevance: the Catholic life does not consist in a mechanical, mediocre practice of the Faith-one that simply meets the minimum requirements of being a Catholic in "good standing"-but in a fully-realized Catholicism that penetrates into every facet of one's existence. Unabashedly Catholic, the ideas formulated in this work may well challenge the reader to confront his own spiritual mediocrity.Carol Jackson Robinson (1911-2002), wrote these five articles for the Marianist magazine at the beginning of her literary career, while she was as yet unmarried, and just several years after her conversion in 1941. Although she was still wrestling with how to view the world through a Catholic lens, she was at the same time co-editor, with Edward Willock, of the intrepid Catholic periodical, Integrity (Volume 1 of which is available from Arouca Press)....Robinson's diagnoses and prescriptions were conditioned by her time and place, but they remain valid for us today, because human nature and our conditions are fundamentally similar. Indeed, when Robinson writes of "perfecting men and their talents rather than deadening the human thing in the interests of mechanical monsters," can we not say today, having witnessed the brutalizing effects of systems that do not allow for this perfection, that her words were prescient?